Say You're Sorry: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A DCI Campbell McKenzie Detective Conspiracy Thriller No 1)

by IAN C. P. IRVINE

  Seeing Wessex at the door, a spasm of guilt swept through him. Talking to his wife and looking at Wessex were not two things that he could do at the same time.

  "I'm sorry, darling. Someone has just come into my office. I have to go. Don't wait up. I'll see you tomorrow."

  Wessex stood before the desk waiting for his conversation to finish, her hands crossed in front of her waist.

  As soon as the phone hit the cradle, she opened her mouth.

  "Have you been avoiding me? I thought you said you'd explain all this morning's shit to me? What the hell is going on?"

  "Nice to see you too, DI Wessex."

  "I'm sorry," she replied, hesitating, immediately picking up on the formality.

  "DI? What's going on Campbell?" she replied, deliberately forcing familiarity back into the equation.

  Campbell looked at her again.

  Beautiful as always. Perhaps even more so this evening. Was she deliberately trying to look even better each day?

  "Please, will you close the door." Not a question. A command.

  As she turned to comply, Campbell's eyes took in the rest of her figure, then quickly looked away, directing his attention out of the window to the Crags.

  "I'm not avoiding you, Danielle. Not really. But perhaps you're right that I've not been spending as much time with you as before. I needed some space for myself. To think about a few things."

  Wessex's eyes studied him, her mouth opening a little as if to say something, but then closing again before any words were said.

  "What happened this morning?" she asked. "I knew nothing about any of this. What are all these new developments that you were talking about? I've been asking around and nobody else knows anything about any of it." She paused. "Were you making it all up?"

  McKenzie laughed, then stood up and moved towards the window. It was dark outside now, but he could still make out the outline of the Crags and Arthur's Seat beyond.

  "Actually, yes. Most of it was, as you say....made up. But not necessarily untrue. We just don't have the evidence to back it up yet."

  "What the hell are you talking about? His brief was there, and you were practically accusing him of killing his own men and stating that we have him and his men on camera with Urqhart in his car."

  "Did I? Oh dear. How naughty of me." He turned away from the window.

  "Danielle, sit down please."

  He waited for her to sit, then he sat down opposite her.

  "The case is going cold. We need to put some pressure on him. If we do, he might make a mistake, or let something slip. Frankly, we need a break, and I’m convinced that he's the one who will give it to us. If he believes that I'm just about to arrest him, and that I have some new evidence that proves he was there with Urqhart on the Crags that night, then he's going to react in some way. He'll do something. Say something. Make a mistake. And we just need to watch him and spot when he does it. Anyway, I wasn't lying completely. This whole case revolves around one thing: finding out how he got into the Park and up the top of the Crags without being seen. If we can figure that out, we'll find some way of proving it, and then we'll have him."

  "You're obsessed." Wessex said, quietly, not with emotion, just as a matter of fact.

  "No," McKenzie replied. "I'm right. And I'm going to prove it."

  "How?"

  "That's the part I don't know yet."

  "Like I said, Campbell. You're obsessed." She said, got up slowly and walked out of his office.

  Campbell watched her go, realising in that moment that she was completely correct.

  DCI McKenzie was completely obsessed.

  With DI Wessex.

  -------------------------

  St Leonards Police Station

  Edinburgh

  Wednesday

  Operation Room

  7.30 p.m. G.M.T.

  "First of all, I just want to say thanks to all of you for everything you've done on the case so far. I've been talking to the Procurator Fiscal, and the case against Petrovsky is strong. He's almost sure that we're going to get a conviction." DCI McKenzie said to the assembled team of officers who had worked so hard and diligently on Operation Queens. "However...and some of you have probably guessed that there's a good reason why I've called you all here this evening. It's to ask you all a simple question. Which is this...'Have we got it right?'"

  The DCI watched the look on the people's faces as they heard the question. As expected, there were the obvious signs of a fair amount of confusion.

  "I know that behind my back, there are some of you who have nicknamed me 'Steinbock' after the German word for goat, because I'm so stubborn. And in this case, stubborn because from day one my gut feeling has told me that Tommy McNunn is the one who's responsible for Urqhart's death. Not Petrovsky."

  He let the words sink in for a moment. By now, he had everyone's undivided attention.

  "Now obviously, this causes us a bit of a problem. Because right now, clearly its Petrovsky who's in the frame, not McNunn. The thing is though, I can't shake the feeling that even though we'll all get a big pat on the back for putting that vicious bastard behind bars for a long, long time, that he wasn't the one who actually did it. The good news is that we've also linked him to the murder in Glasgow, which will also still be a pat on the back, because we've now solved a cold-case file, but the truth is that every cell in my body is screaming at me that McNunn did it. Of course, the reality of the situation is that we've nothing to say that he did. I thought we had a break when apparently one of his two thugs reportedly blabbed that it was McNunn that did it, but wonderfully, coincidentally, the next day they were both murdered. Again, apparently by Petrovsky, or so it would seem natural to assume. But I don't buy it, and right now as we speak, McNunn is in the building giving a statement as to his whereabouts at the time they were killed. No doubt he'll pull something out the bag that proves he was miles away at the time. He always does. Unfortunately, with every day that passes, it gets harder to find anything or anyone that can link him to the Urqhart murder."

  He paused.

  "For me, assuming that it was McNunn who pushed Urqhart from the top of the Crags, the fundamental question is, how did they get there? How did McNunn and presumably two of his men, - although it could have been more or fewer - manage to get into the Park, get to the top of the Crags, and then leave again minus Urqhart, without being seen? How?"

  "You guys have looked at every piece of CCTV footage, and talked to everyone you could, who might have been anywhere near the entrance to the Park. Without any success. So, does the fact that we couldn't find a witness mean that McNunn didn't enter the Park that night? Or does it mean that he entered the Park somehow, or somewhere else than we might expect him to?"

  He paused again.

  "Which is why, I'm going to ask you all to spend tomorrow walking around the Park on foot, each taking a different section of the Park, and each person looking to see if there's someplace that we've not yet thought of where he could have come into the Park. I'm up for any ideas you can come up with. Okay, he probably didn't parachute in, but there must be a way in that we haven't seen or thought of yet. I want you guys to find it. Okay? And if you can't, and by this time tomorrow night none of you have found anything and we're none the wiser, I'll finally accept that I might be wrong. Okay, are there any questions?"

  There were none.

  Chapter 34

  Andheri

  Near Mumbai, Maharashtra

  India

  Wednesday

  00.05 a.m. India Standard Time (IST)

  Anand squatted on his floor, staring at the laptop screen.

  At first, when Anand had discovered the file on the accountant's server, he had wondered what it was, drawn to it immediately by the fact that it was encrypted.

  Most of the other files were not encrypted, but this one was. Which made him curious.

  What was the accountant trying to protect? Or to hide?

  A simple phishing email had solv
ed the problem.

  Anand had constructed an email which had appeared to come from McNunn, asking the accountant whether they should be concerned about the 'new tax laws' the Scottish parliament was bringing in. He'd included a link to a newspaper article. When the accountant had clicked on the link, he'd found the newspaper article no longer existed, but didn't realise that the act of clicking on it had launched some spyware on his computer which recorded every keystroke he made and then dumped it to a hidden file. Anand could then view that file at his discretion and discover whatever the accountant had typed.

  Which is how, after twenty-four hours, Anand had discovered that the keystroke logger had recorded the moment when the accountant had typed in his password and accessed the encrypted file to work on it for a while.

  Once Anand had the password, he could access the raw file himself, anytime he wanted.

  He was now looking at a spreadsheet from the file. Or to be more accurate, a data file containing over sixty separate worksheets, each of which detailed the accounts of separate businesses, all of which seemed to belong to Tommy McNunn.

  The worksheets went into great detail.

  Amongst other things they provided detailed profit-and-loss statements for each business. For some of the 'businesses' there seemed to be two final statements for each. Whereas each worksheet seemed to relate to the same business, they both gave wildly different figures. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that for some of the businesses the accountant was producing two sets of accounts: an official one for the British tax office, and a second one which told the truth.

  Most of the businesses did not have accounts that were prepared for the tax office. They were illegal businesses that were obviously never going to be declared.

  Just looking at them scared him.

  There was so much information in one place. Everything that any police authority would ever need to convict everyone involved.

  The file even contained their names, their bank accounts, how much money they were paid by McNunn. And it gave a lot of details regarding the illegal businesses they were involved in: drugs, prostitution, people smuggling, a protection racket, casinos, brothels, online pornography, online gaming... it was all there.

  There were also some apparently legitimate businesses: a real estate company, a cinema, and a parcel delivery company.

  Whether they were really legitimate or not was hard to tell. More likely they were used to somehow launder the money that the other illegal businesses were making, the revenue from which the file detailed as running into the millions of pounds each month.

  After the initial shock began to wear off Anand realised that the file was enormously powerful.

  If given to the legal authorities, they would have enough to put McNunn in prison and throw away the key.

  Either way, it would be enough to force Mr McNunn to say he was sorry, and to beg for forgiveness for what he had done to Jonathan Stuart.

  With the file, Anand would find his absolution.

  And he would destroy McNunn.

  Of course, there were two rather important questions that Anand still had to figure out the answers to:

  1: Who should he give the file to?

  2: And how could he do it, without getting himself locked up for all the laws he may now have broken?

  -------------------------

  The Dockside Casino

  Edinburgh

  Wednesday

  9.30 p.m. G.M.T.

  Tommy's new boys were waiting for him as the taxi pulled up outside the front of his Casino in Leith.

  Tommy owned two Casino's in Edinburgh, one in Glasgow and one in Dundee. He had an office in each, but he preferred the one in The Dockside Warehouse, so called because it was only a stone's throw from the docks in Leith.

  Nowadays, in comparison with the old days, relatively few ships used Leith Docks. Those that did were mainly involved in the tourist trade, which accounted for almost half of the trade in the casino. Most of the rest came from Edinburgh 'locals' - mainly Chinese, Vietnamese and Eastern Europeans who either had too much money to burn or were in some other way involved in one of the many illegal trades connected to the gaming tables and the people who frequented them.

  "Boss," both of his new monkeys greeted him, as he paid the taxi driver and headed into his club, passing the bouncers who nodded reverently and held open the doors to him.

  Tommy was furious.

  He ignored the people who looked up at him from the tables and greeted him respectfully as he hurried past.

  McNunn was a well-known figure in the underworld of Scotland. People who lived in the shadows of mainstream society both respected and feared him. His establishments attracted both the rich, and the criminal element, all of whom knew that for a price, McNunn would help service their needs, many of which were against the law.

  "Boss", the word was repeated time after time by his employees who stood aside and let him pass.

  McNunn usually had a word for some of them, but tonight he was silent. His face broadcast the mood he was in, and no one was stupid enough to try to speak with him.

  The Casino was split into four main parts, all of which were heavily guarded by a small army of 'bouncers', not all of whom were licensed or unarmed.

  The ground floor was a relaxation area where topless women served expensive drinks in private cubicles. Business of many sorts was conducted in those cubicles, a lot of which was pleasurable for the rich who could afford it. The women who smiled whilst catering for the whims of their customers were mostly not free to do otherwise. They came from other countries, their passports were locked away in a hidden safe somewhere in the Casino, and their wages barely paid their 'debts' or fed their drug habits. Almost all of them were Tommy McNunn's slaves. As long as they kept their looks, they were going nowhere soon.

  The first floor was given over to the 'public' casino, where members of the Club could play any of the games you might expect to find at a top London or Las Vegas Casino. There was also a sound-proofed room for high-value slot machines.

  On the second floor, there were several private rooms, which could be hired out or reserved for private gambling, or where more selective games were run by the Casino management to which only the Casino's most valued or strategic customers were invited.

  The third floor had several private offices, which could also be used as bedrooms for special clients who decided it wasn't worth going home for the evening, or who had special guests to entertain, often very beautiful, and provided by Mr McNunn as a reward for their custom, or in gratitude for services rendered to the McNunn cause.

  The fourth floor, the heaviest guarded, and the most secretive, was from where McNunn chose to run his criminal empire.

  "How did it go, Boss?" the smaller of the two new thugs to be given the responsibility of protecting McNunn asked. Smaller, but also the brighter of the two. He was also a martial arts expert, ex-military and skilled with light arms.

  "Shite. I spent an hour in a room which stunk of damp giving another bloody statement, swearing that I was in Glasgow shopping in the Barras with the Mrs in the afternoon, then working here in the evening. 'Have you got any statements or credit card receipts?' they were demanding. Luckily, Mrs McNunn was really shopping in the Barras, on account of the fact that I had actually sent her there. Don't worry, boys, I'm covered. You'll be keeping your new jobs for a lot longer. It's all just a formality. Anyway, enough about that. Did you get the other boys ready? And Smithie?"

  "Yes, Boss. They're in the bar downstairs. We passed them on the way in."

  "Good. Because we're going out tonight. Hunting. But not before I speak to someone. Could you boys meet me downstairs in an hour? How far is the transport from here?"

  "We're parked up about ten minutes’ walk away. Freshly stolen cars, just as you requested."

  His men disappeared, and Tommy locked the door to his office and poured himself a large whisky.

  Switching off the main light
s in his room and putting on two soft red lights on either side of his desk, he spoke aloud to his Amazon Echo, instructing it to play his favourite piece of music, 'Don't Give Up' with Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel.

  Sitting down behind his desk, he closed his eyes and rested his head back against the top of his chair.

  For the first time in days Tommy began to relax.

  This was his kingdom. From this room, he ruled, sovereign. King and dictator of an eighty-million-pound business empire. An empire which he had built up. He alone, without any fancy education or business degree.

  Tommy had four strengths.

  Firstly, he understood people.

  Secondly, he didn't give a shit about what other people thought. He did what he thought was right, and so far, it had all worked out.

  Thirdly, he was smart.

  Fourth, he knew who his enemies were. Either he kept him them close, knowing what they were up to all the time, or he found some way to remove them.

  Over the past twenty years Tommy had risen from the bottom of a very large cesspool of Scottish criminality, to become one of the premier crime lords in the land.

  Until a few days ago, everything had seemed on track for him to rise even further. He was close. So close. But the events of the past week had been deeply unsettling. It seemed that Petrovsky was perhaps smarter than Tommy had given him credit for. Even from within prison, Petrovsky was somehow managing to dismantle Tommy's life.

  Whatever Petrovsky was doing was clever. Very clever. How he was doing it, he didn't know. But Tommy would find out. He would learn from what was happening to him. And in the course of destroying Petrovsky and his organisation Tommy would emerge even stronger.

  The key to that was identifying who in Petrovsky's organisation was behind it. Who was the person, or persons, who were masterminding everything that was happening to him?

  Tonight, Tommy was going to find out.

  Unfortunately, that was not Tommy's only problem. McKenzie was getting close. Too close. The man was obsessed with destroying him, and wouldn't let a sleeping dog lie.